DIY Crafts With Glass Jars And Bottles

Do you have an entranceway or area that is a bit bare and needs an interior decorator’s touch? Why not try this DIY where we share some glass bottle decorating ideas. If you’re like me you may already have a collection of old liquor bottles and jars that looked so pretty that you simply couldn’t throw them away in the glass recycling bin. Don’t worry if you don’t already have a set as now you have a great excuse to have a cocktail party and then use the empty bottles to decorate your home.

What you’ll need

glass bottles in different sizes and heights

glue

double-sided sticky tape

twine

acrylic paint

metallic spray paint

sponge paintbrush

starfish or shells

feathers

Activity

Firstly you’ll need to clean all the bottles you have and soak them in some hot soapy water to get the sticky labels off. Sometimes the labels can be stubborn so just use some elbow grease, hot water and extra washing up soap on them.

TIP – One of my bottles had the label actually painted onto the glass. If you have one like this a little bit of steel wool will help scratch the paint off, however it will not scratch the glass on your bottle.

You may need something sharp to pull off any left over parts, like the metal ring from the lid of the bottle.

An odd number of bottles looks best as they make more of a statement and it looks impressive with a large collection, so we decorated seven different bottles for this display. With a big range of bottles you can use several different decorating techniques. The trick is to use complimentery colours and make sure the colours are balanced. Eg. Not just one bottle with red, balance it out with something else red in the display.

Using some craft glue, paint around the top half of the bottle and then start wrapping some twine around so that it sticks to the glue.

TIP – At the beginning, fold the end of the twine down about an inch and then start wrapping over the top of that so that you can’t see where it began.

Paint another section of glue and repeat the wrapping of twine until the whole bottle is covered.

When you come to the end, cut the twine and then dot some glue between the final two rounds before placing a pin in them to hold the twine in place until the glue dries. This helps to keep it neat and once dry you just can easily remove the pins.

It looks great just like this, but we painted this one with red acrylic paint to co-ordinate with one of the other bottles.

On another bottle we only covered the top part of the bottle in twine and then painted it with teal acrylic paint using a sponge paintbrush. Mask off the part of the bottle you don’t want painted with some masking tape, which you can easily remove once it’s all dry.

With an old spaghetti sauce bottle place some double-sided sticky tape over the area you want to wrap. Work out which is the best side to have as the front and then start with the twine around the back, wrapping neatly around the bottle next to the previous wrap until you reach the end. With this bottle we wrapped some coloured twine only around the middle of the bottle on the indented part where the paper label used to be.

This liquor bottle was one of my favourites with the interesting geometic shapes all around. Using some metallic silver spray paint we took it outside to a well-ventilated area and spray painted it all over to really highlight the surface textures.

We also painted a tall, thin olive oil jar, this time inside. Instead of painting the outside, we loaded the inside of the bottle with paint, put the lid back on and then shook it around and upside down until the paint covered the whole of the inside. After that you’ll need to turn the bottle upside down so that the excess paint can drip out and then set it somewhere warm to dry.

This alcohol bottle was already very pretty with the shape and frosted glass so we used some twine to tie a starfish to the front.

Once all the paint and glue is dry you can have some fun making a little display with pretty peacock feathers or dried flowers. Take your bottle collection and get decorating for a thrifty display with a difference.

(This article originally appeared on Kidspot.com.au and has been republished here with permission.)

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Since 2010 my crafty mum blog – Craftsmumship has had loads of crafty ideas and projects that have inspired me in one way or another. I love exploring all kinds of craft, dreaming them up, starting them and hopefully finishing them. Most importantly I love sharing my craft with the world on a regular basis.

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